“Most people are about as aware of their surroundings as a sea cucumber.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Blue Labyrinth
“How awful a knowledge of the truth can be.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Blue Labyrinth
“There was a pause while Pendergast considered this. “I prefer hypocrisy to poverty.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Blue Labyrinth
“My idle curiosity might lead to something more official, if the lieutenant feels his work is being hindered by an officious, small-minded, self-important bureaucrat. Not you, of course. I speak in general terms only.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Blue Labyrinth
“What was that line of Sophocles from Oedipus Rex? “How awful a knowledge of the truth can be.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Blue Labyrinth
“sometimes not knowing can be a lot worse than knowing—even if knowing proves to be very painful.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Blue Labyrinth
“specimens, wait until they’ve been examined, then put them back.” “Bone librarian—a most apt description. How many visiting scientists”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Blue Labyrinth
“You just put your boot so far up his ass, he’ll have to eat his dinner with a shoehorn.” “I can always count on you for a suitable bon mot.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Blue Labyrinth
“There was a pause while Pendergast considered this. “I prefer hypocrisy to poverty.” “Come to think of it, there is a rationale. Leng didn’t make his money from killing. He made it from speculating in railroads, oil, and precious metals.” Pendergast raised his eyebrows. “I did not know that.” “There is much you still don’t know about him.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Blue Labyrinth
“To one side, a vintage Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, polished to a gem-like brilliance, sat on a flatbed trailer, ready to be taken to its new owner. Constance looked from Pendergast to the Rolls and back again. “I really don’t need two, you know,” he said.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Blue Labyrinth
“Mrs. Trask turned to him. “When Mr. Pendergast asks for something, we do not say no.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Blue Labyrinth
“I like your custom 1911,” the man said, glancing at Pendergast’s weapon. “Les Baer Thunder Ranch Special? Nice-looking piece.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Blue Labyrinth
“Hezekiah Pendergast,” Constance continued, “was the great-great-grandfather of Aloysius—and a first-rate mountebank. He began his career as a snake-oil salesman for traveling medicine shows and, over time, devised his own ‘medicine’: Hezekiah’s Compound Elixir and Glandular Restorative.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Blue Labyrinth
“What you’re suggesting is that Hezekiah’s elixir caused epigenetic changes. Such changes can and do get passed down the generations. Environmental poisons are the leading cause of epigenetic changes.”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Blue Labyrinth
“words, it gave a rather convincing impression of trying to elude pursuit.” The dry, faintly ironic delivery”
― Douglas Preston, quote from Blue Labyrinth
Douglas Preston
Born place: in Cambridge, Massachusetts, The United States
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“I’m sick. It’s true. It isn’t going to go away. All my life, I’ve thought that if I just worked hard enough, it would. I’ve always thought that if I just pulled myself together, I’d be a good person, a calm person, a person like everyone else.”
― Marya Hornbacher, quote from Madness: A Bipolar Life
“J.D. nodded. Yes, yes, fine, thank you. Nice attitude, by the way. Like boss, like secretary.”
― Julie James, quote from Practice Makes Perfect
“Theophilus Hopkins was a moderately famous man. You can look him up in the 1860 Britannica. There are three full columns about his corals and his corallines, his anemones and starfish. It does not have anything very useful about the man. It does not tell you what he was like. You can read it three times over and never guess that he had any particular attitude to Christmas pudding.”
― Peter Carey, quote from Oscar and Lucinda
“You can’t order the waves to be silent, madame,” Baldanders told her. “They are coming, and they are bitter with salt.”
― Gene Wolfe, quote from The Urth of the New Sun
“And growth has no end. One part of my life was given over to the service of destruction; it belonged to hate, to enmity, to killing. But life remained in me. And that in itself is enough, of itself almost a purpose and a way. I will work in myself and be ready; I will bestir my hands and my thoughts. I will not take myself very seriously, nor push on when sometimes I should like to be still. There are many things to be built and almost everything to repair; it is enough that I work to dig out again what was buried during the years of shells and machine guns. Not every one need be a pioneer; there is employment for feebler hands, lesser powers. It is there I mean to look for my place. Then the dead will be silenced and the past not pursue me any more; it will assist me instead. How simple it is—but how long it has taken to arrive there! And I might still be wandering in the wilderness, have fallen victim to the wire snares and the detonators, had Ludwig’s death not gone up before us like a rocket, lighting to us the way. We despaired when we saw how that great stream of feeling common to us all—that will to a new life shorn of follies, a life recaptured on the confines of death—did not sweep away before it all survived half-truth and self-interest, so to make a new course for itself, but instead of that merely trickled away in the marshes of forgetfulness, was lost among the bogs of fine phrases, and dribbled away along the ditches of social activities, of cares and occupations. But to-day I know that all life is perhaps only a getting ready, a ferment in the individual, in many cells, in many channels, each for himself; and if the cells and channels of a tree but take up and carry farther the onward urging sap, there will emerge at the last rustling and sunlit branches—crowns of leaves and freedom. I will begin. It will not be that consummation of which we dreamed in our youth and that we expected after the years out there. It will be a road like other roads, with stones and good stretches, with places torn up, with villages and fields—a road of toil. And I shall be alone. Perhaps sometimes I shall find some one to go with me a stage of the journey—but for all of it, probably no one. And I may often have to hump my pack still, when my shoulders are already weary; often hesitate at the crossways and boundaries; often have to leave something behind me, often stumble and fall. But I will get up again and not just lie there; I will go on and not look back. —Perhaps I shall never be really happy again; perhaps the war has destroyed that, and no doubt I shall always be a little inattentive and nowhere quite at home—but I shall probably never be wholly unhappy either—for something will always be there to sustain me, be it merely my own hands, or a tree, or the breathing earth. The”
― Erich Maria Remarque, quote from The Road Back
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A Cast of StonesBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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